uuworld.org 

Participation will likely increase across the board, because on the Internet even the smallest participation has an effect. When you talk back to your television no one hears. But when you comment on a blog, people respond. Your questions get answered—maybe by the individual blogger, but more likely by the larger commenting community. You are given references, reminded of similar incidents to the one under discussion, linked to background articles. Your arguments get challenged, refuted, and then maybe picked up and fixed by someone else. Even if you don’t have an airtight case, even if you haven’t checked all the details, your point may be worth making. Someone else may take the baton from you and carry it a little farther. And then someone else and someone else.

Drops of water turn a mill.

My fonder hope for the Internet is that it will do for religion what the printing press did for science. Publication meant that the process of science—its experiments and its data—could become public, and not just its conclusions. The scientific community moved beyond the individual gentleman in his laboratory and became a truly communal intelligence. It was fine if no individual understood everything; no one had to. The scientific community as a whole understood.

To my knowledge, no religious Internet community has yet achieved the critical mass necessary to make a similar leap. But the larger political blogs are beginning to. You can spend a great deal of time on either a liberal blog like Daily Kos or a conservative one like Redstate without realizing who the original blogger is. The commenting community is the star, not the founder.

In the Television Age, politics is dominated by ideology. Small packages of ideas come down from on high and are endlessly repeated in sound bites. But while the political blogs certainly have their share of ideology and repetition, something else is happening too: Ideologies are being tested against the everyday experiences of thousands, and a new kind of understanding is emerging from below. Where this understanding will take us, I cannot guess.

 ars Technica says in 2003:

In 2007:

• 47% of their time was spent reading content
• 33% of Internet users’ time was spent on online communications

via: Church Marketing Sucks